25 February 2011

Military expenditure: a top ten snapshot

As background to several disparate bits of current research, I've been assembling tables of background data on national expenditures in different economic areas.

The figures have to be taken with a pinch of salt, since bases for classification vary from country to country and derived compound measures depend upon assumptions made by me or by others. Nevertheless, those shown below are sufficiently correct to give a feel for current overall pattern.

The tables show the top ten military spenders from three different perspectives:

  1. crude national military expenditure in billions of US dollars, and as a percentage of the world total.
  2. crude expenditure in US dollars per capita.
  3. expenditure as a percentage of the country's gross domestic product.

1 comment:

Dr. C said...

Is it not ominous that both Saudi Arabia and Israel are close to the top in expenditure per capita and %GDP?